style to other forms, they began to employ it elsewhere, for example in sacred music, such as psalm settings. The texture of the music was almost uniformly homophonic, with all the voices singing essentially the same rhythm. The repeating pattern of longs and shorts, following the poetry, was irregular, leading to the perception to a modern ear of irregular meters. Occasional short melismas – decorative passages to ease the monotonous rhythm – appeared in many of the parts, especially in the work of Claude Le Jeune. Long and short syllables were invariably set in a 2:1 relation, for example quarter-notes on the longs and eighth-notes on the shorts. This was in order to mirror long and short syllables used in classical poetry, which in contemporary poetry would be stress accents. In modern notation, the meters would be irregular; often music in the musique mesurée is left unbarred in modern transcription, or given bar lines only at the end of phrases. In addition to their use of ancient metres, composers of musique mesurée also used later interpretations of classical musical modes in order to move the emotions of their listeners, as it was described in ancient Greek sources. Influence While musique mesurée was created and sung by a small group of people for a limited audience, and for the most part in secret, it was to have a profound effect on French music for the next hundred years. The air de cour, the secular style of song which dominated the musical scene in France beginning in the 1580s, used the principles of musique mesurée with the difference that it usually used rhyming verse. In addition, even in the late 17th century, the influence of musique mesurée can be seen in the style of French recitative, both in opera and in sacred music. Composers that continued using the methods of musique mesurée into the 17th century included Jacques Mauduit, who used it for creating large works for mixed vocal and instrumental forces, roughly in the Venetian style, and Eustache Du Caurroy, who used the method for psalm settings. Marin Mersenne, in his Harmonie universelle of 1636–7, praised Du Caurroy as the finest practitioner of the style. Media References and further reading Inline General French music Renaissance music genres